The Asocial network

I’ve been online for a while now. I remember having a Hotmail¹ account around 1998 or so, discovering Geocities² perhaps a year before that. I first browsed on the old Netscape Navigator³. You get the idea.

First, an aesthetic rant: the early internet was nothing like what you see now. It was fugly, with marquees⁴ being terribly abused all over the place, etc — but that was the point! Everyone rolled their own pages.

Now, everything looks better — but everything looks _the same_⁵. Its all rounded corners and whitespace. That’s nice to look at, but, you know, boring. Anyway …

There have been various things that can be called “social networks”. I remember reading an old “Internet for Dummies” and puzzling over Compuserve and AOL (Usenet was, even then, already very old); there were separate instructions and clients and so on for each of them. Later (after the (first ?) dot-com bubble) there were Friendster and Myspace. And today, of course, you have Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. But these were not all the same — and I don’t just mean they looked different.

Now Facebook is hugely successful and it has succeeded in reliably and (mostly happily) connecting lots of people all over the world (though WhatsApp etc seem to have since picked up a lot of the “quick messages” that people use to stay in touch) …

… but I resent being forced into a “standardized template”. Photo to share? Add it to the designated spot. Thinking of something? Enter it in this box. Wait, you don’t have anything interesting to share? Ah, how about this little news or notification! Worried about not having anything to say? Here’s a 1-bit channel ready-made for you: click right over there where it says “Like”.

At the end, you have a profile that looks like everyone else’s profile, except for the profile image swapped out, a slightly different selection of music, a slightly different stream of +1s or Likes. This would be fine if it wasn’t for people becoming their profiles.

The worst part of all this isn’t just the uniformity of presentation or the standardization of forms of content. Nope, it’s the slow, subliminal conformity of what you share about yourself. Over time, the vast majority of posts are mostly all the same — photos of food, smiling photos at place X, and so on, with an extremely predictable stream of responses and “likes”.

Now I don’t want to be too extreme here; there are other collections of “why not to use Facebook” (e.g. Stallman’s page here), which I find hyperbolic (of course it’s ok for Facebook to withhold anonymity for you, to show you ads etc — don’t like that, don’t use it, etc.). Maybe every generation has its own version of “Eternal September”⁶, and this is mine; I don’t know.

So it’s not all bad, obviously. But hey, I’m free to rant, and I want the freewheeling, chaotic internet I remember back, dammit. Except that it probably never was really as I remember it to be, and a decade or two from now, it won’t be for you either 🙂